Last week we were treated to a wonderful lecture on VLF 4 – a large-scale manuscript of Pliny’s Natural History by Mary Garrison. Garrison debated the origins of the manuscript, drawing attention to the fact that few Anglo-Saxon scriptoria in the eighth century would have had the resources to produce such a manuscript, bearing in mind that each leaf would have taken a full sheep skin to make. Not only would this have required a considerable financial outlay, but, Garrison speculated, would have probably necessitated the suspension of other copying activities in the centre. The material demands of the copying of medieval manuscripts were immense, and cannot but capture the imagination.

In school in Dublin I learned a version of the Old Irish poem Pangur Bán, translated by Robin Flowers. This famous translation of a lyric found in a manuscript dating from the ninth century at the monastery of St Paul in Carinthia (in southern Austria) describes a scribe’s cat, Pangur, his companion. Flower’s version memorably ends with the following lines:

‘Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night,
Turning darkness into light.’

Such poems contribute to our image of the medieval scribe as an isolated figure, engaged in a lonely task. But, there is also something redemptive in the image of the monk dedicated to his work. The Dublin poet Micheal O’Siadhail captures this aspect in his poem Early Irish Lyric.

‘Once again picture him near St Gall,
a monk in exile. Cinctured, diligent,
he is glossing, paving a Latin grammar.

Truth to tell, just being here,
Housed alone, housed together,
Adds up to its own reward:
Concentration, stealthy art.’

The reality of the medieval monastic scriptorium was probably more sociable and businesslike than these images convey. Garrison’s implication that a manuscript the size of VLF 4 must have been the product of considerable planning demonstrates this. By the late twelfth century, the process of copying books was largely a commercial enterprise, carried out in the streets surrounding the emergent early universities. But, at the heart of the medieval manuscript remains the moment of recording, of composition, of a single individual’s quill against a page.